I have been a Adobe Photoshop Lightroom user since the first day I started photography. When I was still shooting with the Nikon cameras, I never gave it a thought about trying out other RAW editors. However, things changed for me after I switched to Fujifilm X series camera, specifically Fujifilm X-T2. The biggest problem with Lightroom is it simply can't handle sharpening Fujifilm's RAW files very well. Every time I had to bring the RAW files into Photoshop as a tiff file then apply sharpening there. I found this process is not very enjoyable. Eventually I decided to give Capture One a try. I downloaded the free trial version and purchased a license after the 30-day free trial. Now I have been using Capture One for more than six months, and finally I made the decision to entirely switch from Lightroom to Capture One, not only because it handles Fujifilm's RAW files better, but also because it provides more powerful tools that meet my needs. In this post, I am going to talk about the features that won me over to Capture One. Remember Capture One provides a 30-day free trial and at any point if you are interested to purchase the license, you can save 10% by using the voucher code AMBCAI.

How many pixels do you need to make a large print? Sometimes you hear people say the more pixels the camera has, the better the print looks. Sometimes you hear some other people say you don’t need more than 8 megapixels to make a print at any size. So who is right? In this video I did a 30” by 40’ print from a 20 MP photo, and I will show you how the print looks at different viewing distances.

As I mentioned in the video, the method I used is rather simple and straightforward. I set up my Fujifilm X-T2 with the 35mm f/2 lens to capture a footage of the print at different distances, so later I can compare the footage to decide if the print looks good at each viewing distance. I tried a couple viewing distances as following:

15 Inch away from the print

30 inch away from the print

45 inch away from the print

60 inch away from the print

I put the camera further back until I can have the entire print fit into the frame

Here are some results as I mentioned in the video. At 15 inch viewing distance, the print does look soft. Also at 15 inch viewing distance, my Fuji X-T2 only captures a tiny little portion of the entire frame. When the camera is back up to 30 inch away from the print, the details look much sharper and the print starts looking better. At 45 inch viewing distance, the print looks good and sharp. Beyond 40 inch viewing distance, I didn’t notice any noticeable improvements in terms of sharpness and the print looks sharp and nice to me.

With this video, I want to demonstrate that

If you regularly make large prints and you expect people to look at your prints at a very close viewing distance, you can definitely benefit from a high-megapixel camera

If you make large prints but you don’t expect people to look at your prints at a close viewing distance, then you are probably going to be just fine with a 16-24 MP camera.

If you don’t make large prints, then you don’t need to worry about your camera’s resolution.

Another benefit of high resolution camera is the capability to crop. It is definitely true and I totally agree with that. The more megapixels your camera has, the tighter you can crop. But I just want to point out that it might not be the only option you have. You can also consider using a different focal length or using a different lens. But yes, there are some circumstances, such as wildlife photography, even though you are already using a super long lens, you still want to crop in a little bit. In this case, you can benefit from a high megapixel camera.